Manufacturing Consent Revisited

Noam Chomsky’s ideas on the media in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media have provided us with a guide, full of cautionary tales and ideas that are still controversial to this day.

The book was published in 1988 – a year before the end of the Cold War when it was announced that western liberal democracy had triumphed, heralding the end of ideology, authoritarianism, and propaganda. In the past 30 years, we have seen the mass communications industry multiply, providing an illusion of choice, echoing the rhetorics of freedom – of press, of expression – but not necessarily yielding the pluralism liberal democracies had promised. In that way, the book continues to resonate.

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